This is why sleepy people and phone in the car people pull out in front of cyclists and motorcycles all the time - their brain is saying, "Is a car coming?, No, ok then, proceed.' Then they pull right out in front of the non-car object despite looking right at it. I would not at all be surprised if sleepy or otherwise distracted driving kills as many people as drunk drivers.

Meh, if I'm told to look for a tumor that's typically in the middle I won't even scan the outside. darker areas for a different dark shape. If I'm looking for a cracked rib before I see any real detail I've already located the rib in question and am examining it, everything else is background noise. To stand out when I've got a goal in front of me it's got to be contrasted enough to stand out even within the less capable peripheral vision.

This "study" may have that flaw...

If I ask you to enter a room that you've never been in before and tell me what color the ceiling is, but when you walk out and I ask you what color the carpet was instead, you'll be pissed that I wasted your time.

It's not that you couldn't tell, it's that you did not care. An interior decorator may have noticed, or someone who happens to walk while looking down, etc.Now, if there was a strobe light and you had other tasks to perform, maybe you noticed and even noted it at the moment, "hey, nice carpet", but returned to your task and because it wasn't actually memorable for any real special reason, you promplty flagged it as unimportant and more or less forgotten.

We see and process so much information all of the time we make a lot of calls on priority on the fly.

This is how vision works. We see and recognize(in detail) only what we're focused on, in a physical sense as well as a mental sense. Magicians have taken advantage of this for years and years, it is not news.

This is why women pull out the "What color are my eyes?" trick when they're trying to pick a fight. We don't focus on the eyes themselves, but use them as a center of reference for facial recognition and reading emotions and such. Well, when we can tear our eyes off of their breasts that is.Also, unless special attempts are made(or the longshot notable memory where you get that odd dreamy "just happened to notice" vibe.(IE people have an accident of one sort or another and seem to have an increased span of memory due to the adrenaline rush or whatever, in this case it's an associative thing a more profound of "You don't know the date Gramma died? Cretin!...I know it was Jan 15th! It happened on my birthday after we had cake"), we are not likely to remember such a small detail of color. Can't see it across the room, nor is it valuable information in the sense of communication. Add to that that eye color can drift and appear different in different lights, it's more of an longshot anyone should remember eye color on the spur of the moment.

As a challenge, try to visualize your eye color right now without looking in a mirror. The look of your facial hair if you were up close to a mirror, any particularly long or unruly hair in your beard/eyebrows/etc? Any achne today? Do you need to trim your nosehair? Grey hairs?As above, if you haven't specifically noted these things, it's likely you have no idea at the moment, sure, you could wager an educated guess(rarely have zits so...) but that's not the same as actually knowing.

Jesus, if anyone should KNOW these answers it should be YOU!

It's akin to being challenged to prove you saw The Bucket List...by answering this question:How many moles does Morgan Freeman have on his face?

Stibium:The thing that my mind questions is how can you miss it if you are looking all over the X-ray for something that's causing symptoms? I read the headline, immediately looked at the X-ray and tried to figure out what it was and what was the "gorilla." (I assumed "gorilla" was a metaphor, not an actual gorilla.) It took me a couple seconds to scan from the left side to right and see it.

Because it wasn't one image. The 'x-ray' in question was actually a CT stack (about 250 images) and five frames in the stack had the gorilla at various levels of transparency.

If radiologists scanned across each and every image in detail, your CT would never get read. They are rapidly moving back and forth between frames to scan for very specific kinds of abnormalities. The gorilla looks nothing like the abnormalities they are trying to find, which is why they get inattention blindness. That's not always a bad thing - if they didn't lock their focus in on the specific patterns they are seeking, they might become better at seeing prank gorilla images but worse at actually finding lung cancer.

jack21221:Embden.Meyerhof: If there was a disease which caused gorillas to grow inside my body, I'd bet the radiologists would find it in their pictures.

Since there isn't such a disease, I'm not concerned about it.

You should be concerned.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15995100

Here is a case study where a guidewire was left in a patient, and despite being clearly visible on three x-rays and a CT scan, every doctor missed it. I first heard about that case study in The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons. It's an excellent book. The problem is not gorillas. The problem is missing things that you're not specifically looking for.

The thing that my mind questions is how can you miss it if you are looking all over the X-ray for something that's causing symptoms? I read the headline, immediately looked at the X-ray and tried to figure out what it was and what was the "gorilla." (I assumed "gorilla" was a metaphor, not an actual gorilla.) It took me a couple seconds to scan from the left side to right and see it.

Yet another reason to get more doctors into the medical sector and relieve the caseload already on doctors as it is.

Here is a case study where a guidewire was left in a patient, and despite being clearly visible on three x-rays and a CT scan, every doctor missed it. I first heard about that case study in The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons. It's an excellent book. The problem is not gorillas. The problem is missing things that you're not specifically looking for.

I remember getting some people to watch that gorilla video before, a couple of them were totally convinced it was a trick and that there were two different videos, one with the gorilla and one without.